View on Storify.

Recently Facebook announced a new metric, ‘people talking about,’ would be available on the left sidebar of pages below the number of likes. The number shows how many people have interacted with the page by liking it, commenting, or sharing, and it is meant to show how active a page is. We used this number to do an analysis of around 45 life science companies on Facebook, helping us to understand which companies are successfully engaging life scientists, and why they are successful.

Two charts are needed to fully understand the data, and you can also look at the raw data in the Google document. The first chart shows the number of ‘people talking about’ for each page, along with the percent engagement, or this number divided by the total number of ‘likes’ for a page. You can see that Life Technologies holds all five top spots for ‘people talking about’: Invitrogen, Applied BioSystems, Life Technologies, Molecular Probes Handbook Club, and GIBCO Cell Culture. We applaud them for their efforts, and have been tracking their activity, which helps us to understand what the numbers mean. The Invitrogen and Applied BioSystems pages were launched about six months ago, and we noticed growth was slow for months. Recently both pages have shot up in the # of likes, and we are fairly sure this growth is due to advertising. So, since the ‘people talking about’ number includes how many people have liked the pages, these numbers are high for the pages now, and will likely only be sustained with advertising.

We have found that Facebook ‘likes’ can be obtained for about $1 each (contact us to learn more), so by much hand waving you can surmise that LIFE is putting a healthy budget into Facebook advertising, perhaps $10-20K per month.

The numbers in the first chart also speak to great content which the top companies are providing. Engagement will surely go down after the $ is spent if the content does not continue to engage. The chart above is probably biased by the influx of advertising dollars, so we also charted the total number of life science page ‘likes’ below. LIFE has pages that have grown greatly due to the content, the Cell Imaging and Molecular Probes Handbook Pages are excellent examples. This content must be not simply a broadcast of a company’s products, something we’ve discussed before regarding life science companies on Twitter.

How do the companies find the content? We’ve found custom RSS feeds, which pull information about a topic from all over the internet, including news, blogs, and Twitter, to be vital for this tactic, and we can set one up for you.

As a scientist or a former scientist, you may want to know how we can reconcile these two metrics and find the top 10 life science Facebook pages. We tried combining the rankings for both charts, and the result was that the ranking was the same for the top chart. So, unfortunately or fortunately at this time for Facebook, money talks, likely because it is somewhat uncharted territory. There are around 750,000 Facebook users who indicate they have a life science degree (data not shown), so a ‘land grab’ for them will likely be taking place over the next year for those who have the resources and a defined social media strategy. Additionally, companies must think about how to capture the leads from these efforts. Stay tuned, we plan to provide resources for 2012 social media planning soon. Also, check out our own Facebook page, where we keep tabs on life science activity. Here are the top 10 Life Science Facebook Pages for those who like lists:

1. Invitrogen
2. Applied Biosystems
3. Life Technologies
4. Cell Imaging
5. Molecular Probes Handbook Club
6. GIBCO Cell Culture
7. Engaging Epigenetics Experts
8. Promega Corporation
9. New England Biolabs
10. Ion Torrent by Life Technologies

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Social bookmarking applications allow you to save and share information from the web and their utilization might appear useful for personal, not professional reasons. However, the more we depend on information on websites and social networks for our work, the more these sites have to offer us. Here are eight ways you can use social bookmarking applications to organize and share information for your life science business.

1. Use Delicious to organize bookmarks as a linkable resource.

   If you read this blog or have attended our workshops, you know that we tag links on Delicious, one of the most popular social bookmarking sites, to help our clients and readers learn and refer to web content we think is useful. For example, the ‘soundbytes‘ tag contains links from our blog series of the same name. Similarly, you could save, tag, and provide links to your customers for internal or external content. Beware, however, that links will be visible to others unless you make each private. Most of the tools mentioned here have browser plugins and smart phone applications, making it easy to save, tag, and comment whenever you find a link.

2. Use Diigo to send collections of links to colleagues.

   You can consider Diigo to be a less popular (for now) but more fully featured social bookmarking site compared to Delicious. What I like about Diigo is that it has a better interface for organizing and commenting on bookmarks; I use the Firefox toolbar. You can create a report including a group of links and the comments you’ve stored for each, resulting in a private document you can share discreetly. For example, you could use it to document your competitors for a product, each link containing comments regarding the competing products’ strengths and weaknesses compared to your product. Again, make sure sensitive links and collections are private, and have your IT group double check if you are unsure.

3. Use Delicious to find influencers in your field.

   What Delicious may lack in its user interface, it makes up for in its popularity. With so many users tagging links they deem important, you can find the top websites in life science and thus the influencers. Check out the results for searching for tags ‘genome and blog.’ Unfortunately, due to Delicious’ poor interface, the results aren’t sorted by popularity unless you install this script. Now, general social media guidelines will tell you that you’ll also be able to use Technorati and Digg to find the top sites, but I’ve found them to be less effective for life science, as they ‘force’ content into categories that are too broad for our industry.

4. Submit news items or blog posts to StumbleUpon.

   You can use social bookmarking applications to help your own web content get noticed. Most experts will tell you that these self-created back links won’t do anything for your search engine optimization (SEO). However, anecdotally I’ve heard that StumbleUpon ‘works’ better for SEO than the other social bookmarking sites, and who knows, maybe your content will get noticed and go viral!

5. Keep social media content consistent and documented using Friendfeed.

   When a company embarks on social media, one of the challenges is keeping track of the content that has been created. Besides keeping an eye on the messaging and voice, there is knowledge gained by those who implement it, such as lists of the best resources in your field, top influencers and success with so-called ‘relationship marketing.’ You can use many applications to track social media content, we suggest Friendfeed as an aggregator of your content, but you could also use RSS or even services such as Packratius to capture all of the links you share on Twitter. You could also create an internal Diigo account for the social media team to document top resources you’ve found. One caveat is that nobody knows how stable these companies are, so ask your IT group about backing up the information periodically.

6. Use Springpad to organize trips, receipts, and leads.

   Springpad not only stores links, but images and lists as well. I’ve used it to take pictures of receipts and to organize information for a trip in one place to easily refer to on my Droid. It’s infinitely customizable, which I find daunting, but colleague Sally Church has used this to her advantage and created a nice system for organizing scientific, company, and customer information for her pharma consulting business.

7. Use Storify to show your company’s portfolio.

   Storify allows you to string embedded websites or online activities such as tweets together with captions into a story (hence the name), as we’ve done for the Comprendia online portfolio. Since we have our own blog, we could also do it here, but it would take longer, and hey, everyone likes a cool new tool. Storify is currently in beta by invite only, but if you beg on Twitter like I did (reply to @storify) you may be able to get in.

8. Use Dipity to document your company’s social media timeline.

   Dipity takes the Storify idea to another level, and provides a time line of embedded online activities. Here is a Dipity time line of the Life Technologies Social Media feed. We used the aggregated RSS feed we made for LIFE Social Media, but unfortunately Dipity doesn’t auto-update the time line (they call it a ‘topic’). You could also use Dipity to follow events such as conferences (using the Twitter hashtag) or to make a time line of your company’s history and press releases, for example.

Hopefully we’ve given you some examples you can use to organize and share information or sparked some ideas for new uses for social bookmarking applications for your business. These concepts are a part of the increasing ‘plug and play’ nature of the web, or the emergence of a so-called ‘semantic web,’ where websites interact well, perhaps obviating the need for companies to have freestanding applications such as blogs. How have you used social bookmarking applications for your life science business? Please share them below.

To share this post easily, cut and paste: Social Bookmarking For Life Science Business: Applications and Examples http://bit.ly/dEDxBz

Here is our latest collection of links and tips for life science marketing and social media:

1. Life Technologies launches Invitrogen Select, a publication alert aggregator.

As we’ve talked about here, research publications are the ‘glue’ that tie life science researchers together, and LIFE is ingeniously tapping into this with it’s new Invitrogen Select website and service. Researchers can sign up for publication alerts in a variety of fields, and LIFE adds an unobtrusive text advertisement at the end of the publication titles. It’s a nice tool for researchers because it is difficult to set up Pubmed alerts which all appear in one email.

2. How to build a social media cheat sheet for any topic.

This is brilliant and self explanatory, I highly suggest doing it to become an expert on any life science topic and/or to generate content for your social media campaigns. If you don’t feel as though you have the time, check out our Custom RSS service, we can generate daily emails for you.

3. The buzz is all about Quora right now…

Quora is a site everyone’s talking about, it is a ‘clearing house’ of questions and answers for any topic. It looks like it will be good for finding thought leaders/KOLs, information, and to establish yourself in an area.

4. LinkedIn Labs launches.

Looks like LinkedIn is launching a bunch of new search tools. This is hot off the presses, I haven’t had time to look into it, as always help yourself! LinkedIn is a treasure trove of information, having more access to it is bound to be very useful.

All links can be found under the soundbytes tag on Delicious, and sign up for Comprendia blog email updates to get our mix tapes delivered to your inbox.
To share this post easily, cut and paste: Sound Bytes: Links and Tips For Life Science Marketing & Social Media 10/14/2010 http://bit.ly/soundbytes1014

We’re starting something new here, inspired by our friends Mike Spear and Walter Jessen, who each provide posts with useful links and summaries regularly. Our ‘flavor’ will be focused on life science & biotech marketing and social media, all meant to keep you up to speed on the interesting things we’ve found during the week. We’re documenting all of the links on the bookmark sharing site Delicious under the ‘soundbytes‘ tag, so you can always reference them (and even sign up for RSS updates–look for the orange RSS symbol). You’ll note that there are many bookmarks there now…we’ve had this in the works for a while. Without further ado, here are our first Sound Bytes!

1. Google Announces ‘Caffeine,’ a new ‘as it happens’ search engine feature.

This link’s a bit outdated, but very important, so I’m including it. Google may be feeling pressure from more timely searches available from Twitter, and introduced this new feature which indexes a ‘subsection of the internet’ quickly. What does this mean for you? We talk about in our workshops and training that search engines love dynamic websites, and this new feature turns this affection up to 11. Which ‘subsection of the internet’ do they index quickly? No one outside Google really knows, but I’m guessing blogs and other social media applications are being indexed quickly. For the Comprendia blog, our posts often ‘hit’ the first page of our target Google search engine keywords within minutes of posting. They may fade away depending on their popularity, but we get great ‘Google Juice’ almost immediately. Meaning? Start that blog yesterday, and post often!

2. More fallout from ScienceBlogs’ ‘PepsiGate’: New Wired Science Bloggers and Bora Zivkovic heads to Scientific American.

We covered ‘PepsiGate,’ Seed Media’s unfortunate episode hiring Pepsico bloggers for ScienceBlogs, and how many bloggers left the popular site. Since that time, many players have ‘stepped to the plate’ to offer these bloggers a home, and Wired Science is one of them. Their effort is certainly one to watch, as is the more ‘home grown’ network Scientopia. This week, the highly respected ex-ScienceBlogs blogger Bora Zivcovik announced he’s helping Scientific American launch a new science blogging network. What does this mean for you, the life science marketer? Advertising on these new sites is definitely a possibility, but I’d like you to think beyond this type of broadcast advertising and think about how you could help these sites in a more context-specific manner. It’s very ironic that the addition of Pepsico to the ScienceBlogs roster caused this cascade of events–if Seed Media had instead chosen a life science company-hosted blog, the outcome would have been very different!

3. Creating Social Media Business Guidelines.

We covered this topic in our Social Media for Life Science and Biotechnology Workshop 2, and as things usually go in this fast paced area, a few great resources have come out since then. Check out this post, it’s a gold mine!

4. RSS feed for Life Technologies Social Media.

Interested in seeing how LIFE is doing social media? We’ve aggregated all of their accounts into a single RSS feed, allowing you to view it in an RSS reader or get email updates. We also created a Twitter list so you can follow them easily. They’re the most active company in life science social media, incorporating many brands, you can learn from them by watching what they’re doing.

That’s all for now, folks, we’ll make another life science marketing mix tape for you in about a week, and sign up for email updates so you won’t miss anything! Stay tuned also for Sound Bytes Videos with tips and tricks from our workshops and training.

To share this post easily, cut and paste: Sound Bytes: Tips For Life Science Marketing & Social Media 9/16/2010 http://bit.ly/soundbytes0916

We stress the importance of good content in our training and workshops, it is the cornerstone of a successful life science or biotechnology social media strategy. Content can be fully original, such as a blog post written by one of your company’s scientists about their research, or you can share links, news, presentations from others on third party applications such as Twitter or LinkedIn, as long as you credit them properly. Both original and shared content benefit from reviewing updates from the web or social networks regularly, and a good way to do this is through RSS (Really Simple Syndication) feeds. RSS feeds do the work for you, telling you when content all over the web is updated, and we can create a customized feed for you based on your needs. See this example of a drug discovery blogs feed we created, or the San Diego Biotech News feed. The information can also be sent as email. Just fill out the Custom Life Science RSS form and we’ll do the rest! We think you’ll also find that a custom feed will help you stay on top of your industry, whether you’re in R&D or Marketing. As always, contact us if you have any questions.

We hear from life science marketers that they ‘don’t have time’ for social media. We think that for many reasons, they should ‘make’ time, as the benefits are far reaching, from reinforcing your brand to getting input on product development. However, we are realistic and know that integrating these habits into your routine will take time, so we’ve created this list that will help you to leverage life science social media by spending just ten minutes a day.

Set up custom RSS feeds. We’ve talked about the power of RSS feeds to deliver customized content from all over the internet, from research publications to company websites to blogs. Set up RSS feeds and use the information to tweet or blog about, as well as to stay on top of what is going on in your industry and with your customers. You can browse this content from an RSS reader or set up customized emails. Need help? We can set up a customized feed and daily emails for you quickly and affordably, check out this example of a drug discovery blogs RSS we set up. We’ll set it up for you, adjust it if necessary, and give you all the information you need to adjust it in the future as needed. As we’ll cover in our July 28th Social Media for Life Science and Biotechnology Workshop 2, great content is the cornerstone of a winning social media strategy.

Repurpose. Different social media applications have different functions and audiences, so there is no harm in sharing a link on, for example, both Twitter and Facebook. In our workshops, we’ve also talked about ‘recycling’ content from your website or blog. Resources, news, and user-generated content such as FAQs can be used. Of course, don’t be too redundant, and don’t consider that posting information about product discounts, etc. is necessarily interesting to your audience all the time.

Automate. Related to repurposing is the fact that you can use tools and tricks to automatically post status updates to more than one application, which is handy. For example, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook all ‘play nicely’ with each other, and you can set them up so that you can post an update on one and feed it to the other applications. In addition, you can use great tools like HootSuite to post to multiple accounts and also schedule updates for later. We do think that there is a lot of value in logging in and browsing your network or followers updates, but to begin with, you can do this weekly instead of daily to save time (see next item).

Use calendar reminders. Some aspects of social media require maintenance, such as growing your Twitter followers or your LinkedIn network. These things can’t be done all at once, so we suggest setting weekly calendar reminders for tasks such as connecting with new people you’ve met on LinkedIn or using Twitter searches to find new life scientists to follow. If you work at a larger company, you may need to aggregate all of your activity using RSS feeds, Friendfeed, or Hubspot, and depending on the size of your company, you’ll want to review these daily or weekly. Also, reviewing metrics such as engagements or return on investment (ROI) is important as well, and is likely best done weekly or monthly. If you want more information about the strategies behind these tactics, check out our workshops and training.

Use the force. One of the great things about social media is that you can find great people to follow, share content from, and emulate. Once you find a few ‘Jedi masters’ you can save time because they will serve as ‘channels’ of information for you to learn from and share. We hope that you’ll consider this blog as a channel of information for life science and biotech marketing and subscribe to updates.

The workflow we suggest follows the order of this list. Start with good content, and the rest should naturally flow, to the last item in which you’ll hopefully be engaging with the thought leaders in your area. We hope that you’ll find so much value in these ten minutes that you’ll branch out more and spend more time leveraging social media. What techniques have worked for you to get the most out of the time you spend using social media? We’d love to hear, please leave a comment below.

To share this post easily, cut and paste: How To Leverage Life Science Social Media in Ten Minutes a Day http://bit.ly/9dLERq

Twitter is not just for breakfast any more. Life scientists and companies are using it to learn and share information, and there are likely a few thousand life scientists and more than 100 related companies using it. One of the really great things about twitter is that you can find connections based on the content they are tweeting, and you don’t need to know them to follow and vice versa. Whether you’re in marketing or do research, the value lies in following a good quantity of high quality life scientists, and having them follow you back, and here are some tips and tricks for achieving this goal.

Follow more life science twitterers. We know purists who think that ‘if you tweet, followers will come,’ they want to grow ‘organically.’ However, if you look at the vast majority of twitterers, their number of followers is roughly equal to the number they follow. So, if you want 1000 followers, you’ll likely need to follow 1000 (and I think is the minimum number you need to get any real traction on Twitter). The good news is that there are many great ways to find life science twitterers, including:

• David Bradley’s Scientist Twibe–600 scientists (perhaps not all life scientists). Follow these scientists, add yourself to this list, and browse sites like wefollow and follow people and add yourself to the appropriate list(s).
• Search Twitter for terms you’re interested (e.g., RNAi, epigenetics) and follow twitterers in search results. Some twitter applications like twhirl allow you to add searches to your stream, making it easy to follow as you go.
• Conference hashtags. Tweets from most life science conferences include a ‘hashtag’, e.g. #asmgm for the ASM General Meeting. Search for the hashtags and follow twitterers.
• Find a great life science twitterer and follow who they follow. Their list can be found on their profile page by clicking on the ‘following’ link. Don’t follow their followers, as these lists are usually a lot more noisier than the list they are following.

Note: You shouldn’t follow more than 100 people a day, as Twitter may flag you as a spammer.

Provide good content. Twitter is used to share news and information related to your interests, be they personal or professional. To get people to follow, you need to give people something interesting to look for. We’re big proponents of using RSS for this function, you can even set it up to send yourself a daily email of customized content from across the web. Of course, you can also promote yourself, as long as you follow our 90/10 rule: provide 90% selfless content, and 10% self-promoting content.

Engage. It’s not enough to just follow and tweet good content. You also need to engage with the life science community. It should come naturally, if not you’re not following the right people! Retweet interesting content, reply to twitterers who capture your attention, or just say hi. I think you’ll find that you’ll even make some friends! They don’t call it SOCIAL media for nothing!

Think holistically. Most social media applications work best synergistically with other tools. A twitter account works much better if you also have a blog which you can tweet about, for example. Also, it’s a good idea to get to know the twitterers you follow by leaving comments on their blogs. The general theme is, be a part of the community! You’ll find you know more about your field and the world in general by following Twitter. You may not notice it right away, but you’ll be getting ‘Tweet Cred’ and your number of followers will grow.

Lighten up. There are many brands, life science and otherwise, on Twitter. The most successful ones show they’re human and tweet some personal information. Regardless of your motives, it’s a good idea for many reasons to show you’re human. For one, it makes the experience more enjoyable. It doesn’t have to be anything unprofessional, it can simply be commenting on the weather, for example. As we’ve pointed out, engaging is key, and nobody wants to interact with a robot! You also may find you share hobbies, etc. with other life science twitterers, allowing you meet those you might otherwise would not have.

This list is good to get you going on getting more followers and mastering twitter, and we also offer Twitter training and as part as our Workshop 3: The Rule of 3’s for 3rd Party Applications: Strategies, Tactics, and Metrics. Contact us for more information, and subscribe to our blog so you’ll get this information in your inbox hot off the press.

Note: The Twitter ‘mascot’ is a blue bird, so a blue dodo seemed fitting for life science. Get it?

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At least four times this week I’ve been asked by someone for help and I’ve politely declined. It’s true that I have a large network and knowledge that comes from years of experience in the industry, and do help people quite a bit. However, I see many people who don’t realize how much they can achieve on their own these days, and think that in some cases it’s better in the long run to show them how and why they should take more initiative. Here’s a short list of the benefits of ‘helping yourself,’ with examples of the many ways we are all more empowered now.

Notoriety. Often people ask ‘can you post this news on your LinkedIn group,’ not realizing that they can post it themselves. What’s the benefit for them to post it? If the news is interesting and relevant to the group, they’ll get some ‘good karma’ from group members for pointing out something useful, and expand their reach. Regardless of your motives, being more well known is a benefit (with the exception of those in the witness protecion program ;).

Opportunity. Together with Notoriety, much opportunity comes when you help yourself. Take the example of posting items to LinkedIn groups–let’s say you post an article about stem cells. You’re automatically letting people know that you’re interested in stem cells. Perhaps someone in the field will look at your profile and offer to connect. The possibilities for receiving highly relevant opportunities are endless when you help yourself in this way.

Knowledge. I am often asked to meet people who want me to tell them what I know about San Diego Biotech. Yes, I do ‘get around’ and may have knowledge, some anecdotal, that others don’t, but I am a function of what I read and do. We set up the San Diego Biotechnology Network website with news and information that helps anyone come up to speed quickly. In fact, I know of three reports that just came out over the past few weeks about California Biotech. Other resources are Xconomy, RSS feeds, Twitter… You may say that you don’t understand these new tools, I would argue that they will become as important as radio, TV, and the internet, so buck up and learn them ;) Today, you really have the opportunity to become an expert in a wide variety of fields, for free.

Control. Sometimes people want to post irrelevant items to the LinkedIn groups I manage. Because they are irrelevant, members get irritated and feel as though they’re being spammed, and I have to delete the posting and potentially remove the member. When this happens, I tell the person that it is much more effective to start their own interest group, something we covered more generally earlier. By starting a group, rather than always trying to find one that fits, you have much more control. The topic needs to be chosen carefully, but we all have valuable offerings for others. (Note: this may seem to conflict with what I said in the ‘Opportunity’ section–however, I always tell people if they question whether a posting is appropriate, they can always ask me.)

Almost on cue, Amy Winehouse’s ‘Help Yourself‘ started playing in the background as I wrote this post…corroborating an earlier post. I hope that these examples inspire you to think about more ways you can help yourself and ultimately achieve more of your goals. Also, if I tell you to ‘help yourself,’ that you’ll understand why.

To share this post easily, cut and paste: Help Yourself http://bit.ly/bMuqwc

I’ve recently come to appreciate the true power of RSS, or really simple syndication. RSS feeds are a way for websites to easily communicate their updated information. Because the information is standardized, it can be picked up by other applications which aggregate the information, such as Google Reader (GR, see summaries here and here for help getting started).

So what? You can set up some really cool automated tools to keep up on just about anything on the internet, including topics relevant to science and biotech business. You can keep tabs on the latest work in your field by setting up RSS feeds for pubmed searches. You can also follow blogs and news by searching for ‘RSS’ or looking for the orange symbol on any website, and subscribe. If you’re like me, you’ll actually feel a bit excited when you find a great blog or website, and find that you can add them to GR.

There are also clever ways to feed customized information into and out of GR. You can set up Google Alerts for updates any topic on the web, and feed it directly into GR (choose ‘deliver to feed). This is great if you work at a company and want to keep tabs on your competitors and their products, or even on your own company. You will know almost instantly when updates are made to a very wide variety of websites (you will be surprised how thoroughly the alerts ‘search’ for information), and GR stores all of the information for your future reference. I have even heard of people feeding all of their email into GR!

GR also has clever ways to send information out, which can be handy if you have colleagues or clients that want updates without using GR. You can put feeds into a folder and send the results into a publicly viewable page. You can go one step further and set up email updates via Feedburner, if you really want to make it easy (we used this trick for our ‘Instant Social Media for Scientists‘ email updates).

So, are you ready to wow your colleagues and coworkers by knowing the latest and greatest, as it happens? This post was partly inspired by a San Diego scientist who told me he was doing just that–impressing his boss with his knowledge of cutting edge research through GR. Additionally, using RSS information can help you to become a ‘channel‘ of information for posting items to social media applications such as twitter. Check it out, and start by subscribing to the Comprendia RSS feed!

To share this post, use the links below or this shortened URL: http://bit.ly/25TEoX